


Blood On Your Shirt

by Thunderhel



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Gen, Supernatural Creatures, blood cw, death cw, knives cw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-13
Updated: 2017-10-13
Packaged: 2019-01-16 21:36:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12351078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thunderhel/pseuds/Thunderhel
Summary: In all honesty, Nursey had known this day would come. Maybe not this exact day, and definitely not in this fashion, but with his horrible timing and ability to be at the exact wrong place at the exact wrong time, making it 20 years before witnessing a murder was almost impressive.He just hadn’t expected to know the murderer.Written for the prompt: Person A is lost in the woods in the middle of the night when they come across Person B in the middle of murdering someone.





	Blood On Your Shirt

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is unrelated to the Monster Haus AU, but you all know how much I love a weird AU. This was written for [**Omgcpumpkins**](https://omgcpumpkins.tumblr.com/) prompt: Person A is lost in the woods in the middle of the night when they come across Person B in the middle of murdering someone. I, uh, got a little excited and forgot about the 'lost' part but hopefully it works anyway. 
> 
> Upbetaed because what could possibly be scarier than catching a typo weeks after posting?
> 
> Warnings: I don't actually know what anyone considers graphic violence but I thought I would be safe. The rest of the warnings are in the tags. Knives. Blood. Death. Supernatural creatures.

Nursey had always hated the phrase ‘his blood ran cold.’ Something about it had seemed so pretentious and cliché. Blood ran hot no matter how afraid you were. In that exact moment however, he suddenly realized what it meant. There was a chill in his veins and ice in his muscles that kept him frozen in place and held his tongue captive as he took in the scene before him.

In all honesty, Nursey had known this day would come. Maybe not this exact day, and definitely not in this fashion, but with his horrible timing and ability to be at the exact wrong place at the exact wrong time, making it 20 years before witnessing a murder was almost impressive.

He just hadn’t expected to know the murderer.

“Nurse?” Dex stared at him, eyes wide and mouth slack as he gaped at Nursey like _he_ was the one doing something unspeakable. “What the fuck are you doing out here?”

The boy currently being pinned down by Dex’s boot had blood splattered across his face, dripping down in sickening patterns from an unnaturally crooked nose and gushing from a gaping mouth that seemed to be missing a few teeth. It took Nursey almost a full minute to recognize him as Chad V. Dex had one hand curled around a piece of wire, the other end of the loop was currently wrapped around Chad’s neck so tight it was drawing blood. Dex’s other hand was wielding a wicked looking hunting knife, held aloft like he was about to run it straight through Chad’s skull. There were dark brown stains on his flannel and streaks of bright sickly red running down his cheeks. In the moonlight, the blood in his hair almost looked like highlights.

Dex did not appear to be bleeding.

“Nurse,” Chad croaked out. His voice was strained and his throat was tight around the wire digging into the thin skin of his neck. He reached one shaking hand out across the gravel, bloody finger tips dragging through the dirt and catching on stones as he reached out to him in desperation. “Help me!” His voice was wet with blood, and Nursey could taste his own vomit in the back of his mouth. He had to run, he had to move forward, he had to get help, but panic wouldn’t allow him budge.

Chad was dying, slowly and painfully, and Dex was the one holding the knife.

Dex. His Dex. His partner and best friend and roommate and his ultimate what-if, was currently in the process of killing another human being in the middle of the woods.

Nursey was dreaming. This had to be the most vivid nightmare he had ever had the misfortune of sleeping through. He couldn’t breathe, his chest was collapsing in, crushing his lungs and his vision was going spotty around the edges. Blood was hard to look at in the best of situations, and it appeared Chad had lost more than Nursey had thought a person had in them. It was collecting in pools beneath his broken body, running in uneven trails through the dirt and twigs.

He was dreaming, surely. But for the life of him he couldn’t remember ever having a nightmare that he could smell. It was over powering, the kind of smell that rested harsher on his tongue than in his nose. It was a coppery tang that he often tasted when he took too hard of a check and bit the inside of his cheek, only amplified to a magnitude his brain wasn’t ready to process.

“Nursey.” Dex had said his name more than once, but it was only on the third time that his hearing began to work again. “Nursey,” Dex repeated again. His voice was the calmest Nursey had ever heard it, but he could see the panic in his eyes. “I need you to stay calm, okay? This isn’t what it looks like.”

“He needs to go to a hospital,” Nursey finally said. It sounded like he was speaking through a tube, his own voice sounding distorted and unnatural to his ears. “Dex, we need to call 911,” he continued, like Dex had come with him on his impromptu midnight jog, like they had stumbled across the bleeding and dying Chad together, and not like Dex was obviously the one trying to end his life.

Handling a life ending in front of your eyes was difficult enough before you had to acknowledge that you knew the one ending it.

“He’s not going to make it, Nurse,” Dex told him evenly. Nursey had watched him have panic attacks before, about school work and family issues, and right now his chest was rising and falling too quickly like it always did when the attacks came. Somehow he still managed to form his words clear and collected. “And he doesn’t deserve to live.”

“What did you do Dex?”

“Nurse-“

“We live together Dex,” Nurse told him. He couldn’t look at his face, couldn’t focus on any part of Dex. All he could see was the blood bubbling out of Chad’s mouth as he shifted in the dirt, rocks and leaves sticking grotesquely to his broken face. His eyes were fluttering closed, like he was fighting to stay conscious despite what looked like a gaping wound running through his chestnut hair.

Nursey had always secretly thought he was kind of attractive, but his dying face was the worst sight Nursey had ever seen.

“We live together Dex, what did you do?” He was repeating it over and over, the phrase stuck in his mouth and unable to process anything else.

“Nursey, please-“

Dex’s last plea was cut off suddenly as everything happened very quickly. Chad, who had seemed a second ago on the verge of dying a most undignified death with his face pressed to the dirt, moved with a speed Nursey was unable to follow. There was a screech and a thud and suddenly Dex was the one lying in the dirt, his arms flopping limply to the side as he slipped into unconsciousness, and Chad was standing over him.

Chad stared wide eyed at Dex’s form, and Nursey thought he might have been in even worse shape than he had thought. His polo was torn and so covered in blood and dirt that Nursey had no idea what color it had originally been, and the cut on his neck was so deep Nursey felt his stomach lurch just glancing at it. The blood from his mouth hadn’t stopped flowing, like a horrible geyser of crimson, bubbling up over his bottom teeth and spilling down his lip and mixing with the blood from the cut on his neck. His eyes were wide and wild; pupils blown so large his eyes looked black.

“We need to get you help. I’ll call 911.” Nursey involuntarily took a step forward, to help Dex, to help Chad, to do _something_ at least, but was immediately thrown on his back.

The world went blurry for a moment as his skull connected hard with a rock sticking out of the path, and pain shot down his spine at the unexpected contact. One second he was blinking up through hazy eyes at the night sky, and the next it was Chad’s bloody face and black eyes taking up the entire world. He had only a second to process how strong the shaking arms holding him down were, before the sky was once again visible and a sharp pain spiked straight through his neck.

He tried to cry out, but something clamped down on the other side of his neck, cutting off his shout before it could even start. He was 6’2” and a college athlete and yet he was held in place as easily as if he were made of paper by a boy on the verge of death as he tore into his throat.

“Get the FUCK off of him!”

The pain spiked once more before it disappeared, Chad’s weight thrown violently off of him as Dex tackled him from the side. Nursey could only stare at the sky, the heavy weight of Dex’s legs still pinning his torso in place as the scuffle broke out between him and Chad V. There was a horrible hiss, a sound that Nursey felt in his bones, and then something much more wet and final sounding.

Like a knife sliding through flesh.

Nursey had previously had no idea what that sounded like, metal tearing through skin and muscle and ligaments, but once he heard it he could not forget. There was that horrible cracking sound, an inhuman hiss, a grunt from Dex, and then the cycle repeated itself once more. Then there was nothing.

Just as suddenly as it had all come on, the world was silent again, save for Dex’s heavy panting, and the sound of his jeans shifting against the dirt as he rearranged himself next to Nursey.

“Fucking shit, are you okay?”

Nursey titled his head to the side. He briefly considered that the puddle of blood his face was currently lying in was mostly his own, but was immediately distracted by the sight of the headless corpse laying only a few feet from him. There was a jagged stump of flesh and bone extending a few inches past Chad’s polo, soaked in more blood than Nursey had ever seen in his life, and then nothing. Further off, like it had been rolled aside carelessly, Nursey could see Chad’s usually fluffy hair, cut through with that original deep wound. He couldn’t see anything past his ruined haircut, but he assumed the rest of the missing piece of Chad was attached to it.

He looked back to Dex, who was pulling something out of his pocket and glancing at Nursey’s neck. He had his bottom lip between his teeth, like he always did when he was nervous. There was now a splatter of blood across his face, like a grotesque and distorted caricature of his freckles, but he didn’t seem to mind.

“There’s a lot of blood, but vampire bites always look worse than they are.” He ripped something in his hands, and then was pressing it to Nursey’s still stinging neck. Nursey flinched, but held still for Dex to work. “These bandages are meant to speed up the process of closing wounds they make,” he explained. His eyes were still wild, he was still panicking, but he was trying to explain it all like it was normal.

In that moment Nursey felt very deeply that he knew Dex far too well and apparently not at all at the same time.

“Did you say vampire?”

“Yeah.” Dex wouldn’t meet his eye, only focused on the task of mending his damaged neck. “We could play the whole ‘what the fuck they don’t exist’ game if you really want, but unless you want to argue with the puncture mark in your neck then I think we can skip that part.”

Nursey swallowed, and then winced as the pain shot through his neck.

Vampire.

Chad V was a vampire.

“Am I gonna be a vampire now?” He asked. Nothing felt real, and it looked like nothing was ever going to be real again.

Dex huffed out a laugh, and finally met his eyes again. There was something soft in his eyes, which was unusual in itself for Dex, and especially unusual considering the amount of blood smearing across his jaw. “No, you’re not going to be a vampire. Unless you feel a really strong urge to go take a drink from our undead douche bag over there.” 

Nursey tried to nod, though he wasn’t sure he succeeded. “I see,” he told Dex, though he absolutely did not at all. The pain in his neck was subsiding significantly, but he couldn’t find it in himself to move just yet. He shifted his gaze back to Dex. His mouth was dry. “Did the V stand for Vampire?”

Dex laughed then, a genuine and deep sound that seemed to shock him as much as it did Nursey. He tilted his head back rocked back on his heels. “Holy shit Nurse, only fucking you.”

“You just don’t want to tell me I’m right.”

Dex rose to his feet and held out his hands to held Nursey do the same. After a moment of hesitation, Nursey accepted.

“You’ve never been right in your life.”

As soon as he was standing, Nursey leaned against Dex’s shoulder, unable to hold his own weight just yet. Dex leaned right back against him, like he might have been having trouble doing the same thing.

Nursey shifted, testing out the pain in his neck with a wince. He risked a glance over at the bloody mangled mess on the ground, and tightened his grip on Dex’s shoulder. “So…vampire frat bro.”

Dex nodded, lips pursed. “Yep.”

“Right.” The smell was unbelievable. It permeated everything, drowning out the scent of the woods around them with its sickening metal tang. Nursey thought he would never be able to smell anything else ever again. “And you just took it upon yourself to rid the world of him?”

Next to him Dex sighed, close enough that Nursey could feel the breath on his face. Under quite possibly literally any other circumstances, it would have sent him reeling. For now it was just a reminder that Dex was still a flesh and blood person who still had breath left in his lungs, and that was enough.

“It’s kind of…my job?”

Somehow, it wasn’t the wildest news Nursey had received that night. “I thought you fixed shit in sorority houses on the side.”

Dex nodded, and Nursey was wholly unprepared for the light push he was given to start moving. He found it in himself to take one full step forward, his legs only wobbling slightly under his weight. “I do that too. But also, you know, uh, monster hunting.”

Nursey hummed. “Right, normal shit. Does everyone in Maine slay fucking monsters on the side or is it limited to your family?”

“Don’t be an ass-“

“A fucking vampire just tried to rip out my goddamn neck Poindexter. “

“-There’s people like me all over the world. Samwell just happens to be my part of it.” He shrugged.

Nursey stumbled again, and Dex had to hold him steady. The world was still fuzzy around the edges. Every time he blinked, all he could see was red. “You trying to tell me you’re here on a monster hunting scholarship? Because I fucking knew it couldn’t be for hockey. You suck.”

“You just witnessed a real live beheading, and you’re cracking jokes.”

The world beheading made Nursey forget how to walk for a full thirty seconds before he figured out which part of his brain moved his foot again. “It’s a pretty popular coping mechanism. Just because you’ve never made a joke in your whole Buffy the Vampire Slayer Life doesn’t mean the rest of us are as devoid of joy.”

“Don’t fucking call me Buffy.”

“If I could remember how to type, I would change your name in my phone right now.”

Dex huffed, but shoved him forward again. It took a few more steps before Nursey realized where they were headed.

Nursey let go of Dex the second they arrived at their destination, reaching out to catch one of the wooden beams of the gazebo –his favorite one on campus, the one that sat right on the edge of the pond- and drag himself inside and onto the bench. Almost immediately he felt whatever adrenaline had allowed him to hobble forward dissipate, leaving him with nothing but a tiredness he could feel in his soul, and the crushing weight of a life changing realization, anchoring him to the bench. He feared that he might never get up again, and feared far more that he was eventually going to have to.

“So-“ he tried to form his next question as articulately as possible with a moment’s consideration, and then promptly spun in place and threw up his diner and late night snack over the railing.

Absently he was aware that Dex had not sat down, but was instead pacing in slow lines back and forth across the gazebo, his gaze flickering back and forth from the path they had just come down and then back out again over the Pond. When Nursey finally wiped his mouth on his sleeve, his dry heaves lessening with nothing left to give, he couldn’t see Dex’s face in the shadows.

“So,” he tried again. “You’re a vampire slayer?”

“Slayer is a stupid word. Like I said, I take care of things that need taken care of.”

“Like Chad.”

“Like Chad.”

Nursey nodded, pretending that was reasonable. “So, you just kill monsters and exorcise ghosts to keep the rest of us safe?”

“I don’t do ghosts. That’s all Thomas, over on the soccer team. He handles ghosts and demons and incorporeal shit. I take anything that’s flesh and blood and can be stabbed.”

Nursey raised his hands in the air and blew out a breath. “Of fucking course, makes perfect fucking sense. Gotta tag team that shit.” There was a heavy pause, during which Nursey wasn’t sure if he was going to throw up again or not. “Are any of the other Chads monsters?”

Dex shrugged one shoulder in a manner that was much more noncommittal than it was uncertain. “I don’t kill everything that’s not human, only the ones that pose a threat.”

“Doesn’t a vampire, by like fucking nature of having to kill to survive, pose a fucking threat?”

Dex’s shoulder shifted and his pacing got a little faster. “They don’t have to kill. They can drink bagged, or eat animals, or feed from people without leaving any major damage.”

Nursey nodded again, or at least he sort of shifted his head a vaguely up and down fashion. “And I’m guessing our friend back there did something else?”

Dex wasn’t pacing anymore. He leaned back against a white post, arms crossed over his chest tight enough to pull his flannel dangerously taut. He nodded.

“What did he do?”

Dex’s shoulders shifted up close to his ears and Nursey realized very quickly that he probably did not want to know.

Dex’s voice was low when he responded. “You’ll hear about it tomorrow. They’ll say it was an animal. They always do.”

Nursey leaned forward. Head between your knees, he remembered someone saying to him one time. Or maybe it had been on a TV show. It didn’t appear to be helping with his nausea or dizziness, but staring at the floorboard of the gazebo seemed a safer option than watching the unfamiliar emotions flicked across Dex’s shadowed face.

“I should have stopped him sooner,” Dex continued, and Nursey knew people well enough to know that Dex wasn’t really talking to him. “But I didn’t think…I mean, I didn’t want to think like that.” His voice had dropped down to nearly a whisper. “Killing monsters isn’t really as much fun as the movies want to make it out to be.” His breath stuttered and Nursey recognized it as Dex’s version of a self-deprecating laugh. “Pay’s crap too, but what can you do?”

“I don’t think the movies make it look very fun for the person doing the killing,” Nursey countered. There were three knots in the wood right below his feet. “It’s supposed to be fun to watch, but I don’t really think it is.” Nursey’s stomach made another movement and he turned to spit over the side of the gazebo once more. “What are you gonna do about the body?”

“Leave it. Sun’ll be up in a few hours. He had a charm that let him walk around in the daytime, but now that it’s gone, he’ll just burn up at sunrise.”

Nursey spit one more time. “That’s tidy.”

“I guess.”

“Why did he attack me?”

Dex narrowed his eyes in confusion. “What?”

“He knocked you out, he could have just ran, but he attacked me. Why?”

Dex ran a hand over his mouth, smearing what blood was still there, and mixing it with what had been on his fingers. The sight made Nursey feel even more ill. He could barely stomach his own blood on his face, let alone having someone else’s smeared across his lips. “He was desperate. He’d lost a lot of blood and wouldn’t have made it far.”

Nursey turned in his seat. The wood of the backrest behind him was cool against Nursey’s forehead as he closed his eyes and tried to collect his thoughts. Monsters were real, or at the very least vampires were, and Dex not only knew this, but knew how to kill them. Dex had killed someone today, and Nursey had a very strong inkling that it was not the first time.

He breathed in hard through his nose, and out through his mouth, and opened his eyes. “Okay, I’m in.”

When he looked back at Dex, his forehead had a concerned crease to it. “You’re in what?”

Nursey pretended to brush dirt off of his knees as he stood up, knowing full well his jeans were absolutely ruined between his collapse in the dirt and the amount of blood soaking patches of red to his skin. “For the whole killing monsters thing, I’m ready. I’m on board.”

“You don’t really get a choice in that,” Dex told him with an unattractive snort. “Shit’s happening whether or not you believe in it.”

Nursey shook his head. “Not what I meant. I mean I’m in for the killing part. I want in. How do I start?”

For almost a full minute, Dex didn’t speak. It looked like he may have short circuited completely, with his eyebrows drawn low and his mouth slightly parted. He might not have taken a breath for their entire standoff. “You… _What_?”

“Look, you saved my life back there, but if you’re right, and this world is somehow even more fucked up than I thought it was, then I’m going to be in more danger than usual when I’m on my own, so I want to know how to defend myself against-“ he waved his arm vaguely in the general direction of where they had left Chad “stuff.”

Dex opened and closed his mouth twice, stuttered, and tried again. “I have trained my entire life to fight these things and you-“

“Really don’t want to die by LAX bro to the neck. So either you help me, or I’m gonna figure it out myself.”

“How do you plan on doing that?”

“Is that, or is that not, a knife from the camping section of Wal-Mart?” Dex’s resulting scowl was all the answer he needed. “See? There we go. I already have the first stop on my list to making my own Slayer kit.”

“Stop saying Slayer, you sound like a douche, and please do not buy a hunting knife. The only person you’re going to hurt is yourself.”

Nursey cast his hands out wide, giving off far more bravado than he felt. “Then help me here Poindexter, you’re the only monster slaying Yoda I have in my contact list.”

Dex huffed, and nearly knocked into Nursey’s shoulder in his haste to exit the gazebo. “No I’m not.”

The heaviness of that statement was enough to leave Nursey winded for a moment before he recovered himself and hobbled after his disappearing defense partner. He wasn’t sure if Dex’s slowed pace was because he was exhausted himself, or if he didn’t actually want to lose Nursey in the woods he had just almost died in, but either way Nursey was grateful.

“That just reinforces my point more, man. Some weird shit is going down, some shit that you know a whole fucking lot more about than me, but I’m not going to play your goddamn damsel in distress. No matter how much you want to see me in a dress.”

That earned him a glare out of the corner of Dex’s eye. The blood splattered across his face was less now, and what was left was smeared heavily. Underneath the grime, his face was turning red.

“Dex. Will. Come on man, I’m asking for your help.”

Dex blinked and readjusted his eyes to the path in front of them. “So, what? You’re gonna train for a week and think you can keep up with me?”

“If young adult novels have taught me anything, it is that that is exactly what is going to happen.” Dex rolled his eyes and Nursey pressed on. “See, I’m the plucky heroine who isn’t like other girls, and you’re the handsome bad boy that just stole into my life with a bad attitude and a dark secret.” He raised one hand, running the backs of his fingers over Dex’s cheek just quick enough that Dex didn’t have time to swat him away. “But deep down you have a heart of gold and over the course of three to five books, we are going to fall madly in love.”

At that, Dex did smack his hand away, despite it being nowhere near his face. “Man, shut the actual fuck up.” He stuck his tongue in the corner of his cheek, like he always did when he was trying not to smile at Nursey’s teasing.

The smell of blood and death and the image of the bloody mass of tissue and muscle at the end of Chad’s neck stump was all swirling around in Nursey’s head, vying for space and pulling at his stomach and clouding his vision.

Nursey laughed.

With a sigh, Dex glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. “You really want to do this? You want to learn what I do?”

“Nope,” Nursey told him honestly, popping the p with far more confidence than he felt. “But I have to. I’m not waiting around to get eaten alive by some shitty frat bro from an even shittier sport. Or worse, a guy from the Greek System.” He shuddered. “Besides, we’re partners. I figure killing together can only make out game better, right?”

Dex shifted next to him, and after a moment he held something out in front of Nursey. It took him a moment to recognize it as the hunting knife, currently holstered in a long black leather sheath. Nursey hesitated only a second before he took the black shining handle being offered to him.

When Dex smiled there was blood in his teeth. “Then let’s get started.”

**Author's Note:**

> Eyy hope you enjoyed it! Hit me up on [**tumblr**](http://dexondefense.tumblr.com/).
> 
> Title is based on a Bastille song even though I listened to exclusively Metallica to write this.


End file.
